Information Technology (IT) is advancing at a rapid pace. The speed of IT product development is seemingly increasing, with shorter times to market, rapid additions of new product features, and so forth.
To keep pace with and better manage IT resources, various aspects of information services and technology, including office technology applications and enterprise business software, are becoming consolidated, unified, collocated and/or integrated. While there are quantifiable benefits to these consolidated enterprise support systems, some simple day to day tasks in managing these consolidated services can be more difficult to initiate because of deeper, comprehensive, multi-tier navigation menus.
After initial deployment of a complex system including consolidated services and applications, an administrator's day to day duties may often be limited to performance of specific tasks. Some example tasks include, but are not limited to: user and user service management (add/edit/delete user, add email service, add telephone, manage access policies), system resource management (add storage, add telephony trunks, lines, and conferencing port etc.), system resource monitoring (telephony trunks available, application status, system events and alarms etc.), and so forth. While some of the tasks listed are directed toward telephony systems, it will be appreciated that any variety of a broad range of tasks may be performed by a system administrator which may be related to a particular industry or business for which the system administrator is administrating.
Thus, while the overall usefulness of a consolidated system may increase as a result of the consolidation, the day to day accessibility of some more commonly used features of the consolidated system can become more complex, cumbersome, and time-consuming to navigate and access. As a result, productivity is decreased and costs are increased.
With increasing consolidation and complexity, there is a desire for faster, easier, more direct and efficient means for navigating to and accessing components, applications, and so forth within the consolidated system.
Reference will now be made to the exemplary embodiments illustrated, and specific language will be used herein to describe the same. It will nevertheless be understood that no limitation of the scope of the invention is thereby intended.